Design and implementation of IEEE 802.15.4 beacon-enabled network devices

In the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, two different operation modes are specified: the beacon-enabled networks, and non-beacon networks. The devices in a beacon-enabled network synchronize with each other and the beacon frame which is treated as synchronization signal also provides some extended features. On the other hand, a beacon-enabled device is hard to implement. Highly processing power is required to meet the constrained timing events and process the beacon packets. In this paper, we propose a priority based scheduling mechanism to implement the beacon-enabled devices. We also evaluate the performance of our implementation. It can be shown that although we use preambles to prevent loss of beacons. They bring almost no impact to the overall performance and duty cycle